Deer and other wild game use their senses of smell, sight, and hearing to detect and avoid their natural enemies. For most large game animals, their sense of smell is their greatest defense. Deer and other trophy animals typically travel into the wind and rely on their sense of smell to warn them of danger. Big trophy animals will avoid an area when they detect the presence of a human, or even when they detect that a human has been there. What warns them is primarily human scent from a hunter being present and residual human scent on anything touched by the hunter's hands, clothing, boots, and equipment. In addition, wild game can smell and avoid unnatural scents from weapons, tree stands, backpacks, and other hunting equipment and accessories. These human and equipment scents tend to settle and pool, and then they are spread by the wind in the hunting area generally and particularly downwind of the hunters.
To make it harder to be detected by game, hunters often attempt to make themselves harder to smell. Currently, hunters attempt to reduce human odors by wearing scent-blocking clothing (e.g., carbon suits) and/or applying masking scents (more-naturally occurring scents). Scent-blocking clothing decreases the amount of odors released from the human body, but does not eliminate odors from the hunter's breath, uncovered body parts, weapons, or hunting equipment. And masking human and other odors does not work well because most game can detect the underlying odors. In addition, unscented soaps are often used for bathing and for washing clothing. But this is a temporary solution, because the human body resumes emitting detectable levels of human scents in as little as 30 minutes afterward.
Accordingly, there is a need for a way to eliminate human and other warning scents from a hunting area so that wild game cannot as easily detect hunters. It is primarily to the provision of such a scent-elimination system that the present invention is directed.